It WAS a bad idea for Japan to attack America and other Western

>>2169835
>I know that Japan's plan was to wipe out the US fleet out in one major battle, which would result in the US ask for a peace treaty, but that wasn't a good plan, right?


Not exactly. The entirety of the fleet, even the Pacific fleet, wasn't in Pearl Harbor. Rather, the plan was to knock down the fleet enough that Japan would have a free hand in the Pacific for about 6 months to a year, at which point they could have dug in a long, deep, island defense, which they assumed (wrongly) that America wouldn't be willing to invest the time and energy to overcome.

>>2169858
right.
but, again, wasn't this a flawed plan?
From my understanding, Japan only attacked the Western powers at that point because their advances in China were stalling. Japan had tried to invade Russia, but that also failed.
It seems that Japan's solution for failing military advances and a shortage of resources was to open up multiple fronts against multiple military powers.
Am i wrong in saying this was a poor plan, or am I oversimplifying the situation?

>>2169835

The bad idea was losing at Midway, when it's obvious that winning at Midway would have been a far better idea.

One that would have removed the burger forever.

>>2169884
IIRC There was a strong sentiment in favor of neutrality in the U.S. at the time, it's possible the Japanese were counting on U.S. public opinion to stall America from entering the War.

>>2169884
West was involved in something called WW2. Japan figured they couldn't be bothered to fight for some islands in Asia while they had an existential crisis going on.

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>>2169884
Axis fags will be eternally butthurt.

>>2169835
The bad idea was being fascist

>>2169884
Japanese high command was sincerely retarded.

>>2169835

No. Simply put, the Japanese campaing was thought up by a pack of retards more concerned with "muh samurai honor" and stabbing their political rivals in the back than any strategic considerations. their error came much sooner though.

Imperial Japan was very dependent on foreign imports, especially for crude oil and rubber. This would not be a problem in and of itself, were it not that their military antics and general unpleasantness made them antagonize the western colonial powers (i.e., the people with oil to sell). This became especiallly critical when their actions in the war in China drove the US to place an embargo on them, which costed the Japanese their last source of foreign oil.

Now, at this point there were two things the Japanes could do. firstly, they could try to negotiate with the Americans, see if there as anything they could do to lift the embargo, by ending their expansion in China or at least treating the occupied civillians more humanely. However, negotiating from a position of weaknesswoul lose face, so instead the Japanese chose for option 2, conquer all of south-east asia for it's resources. Of course, that would bring them in conflict with the British, i.e. the largest naval power at the time, the Americans, a very close second in naval power, and the Dutch, who were also there. While the Japanesse did not worry too much about number 1 and 3, with them being kinda busy in Europe at the moment, America was sitting right across the Pacific and would stomp out any attempts to spread across the pacific, especially since the Phillipines were still a US protectorate.

Now Japanese military planners looked at the raw numbers, and saw they were completely outclassed economically. If the US went to war and turned all it's resources to it, it would utterly crush them. But they were not too worried.

>>2172704

See, when the same military planners looked at American culture, they saw a pack of whiny cowards. These people were staunchly isolationist, and even barely maintained an army. Sure, their navy was pretty big, But the Japanese navy was large, well equipped and hoping to finally see some action, and assured everyone they could take the US navy. And they believed that after they dealt a decisive blow to the US navy, the US would shy away from further conflict, prefering to take diplomatic channels instead.

This line of thinking mostly came from culltural differences, but the "decisve blow"idea came from an American naval strategist that the Japanese navy was in love with,Alfred Mahan. Basically, he was thinking in in terms of attrition, where a navy would gather all available resources into one fleet and take out the ships of the enemy navy, preferably one by one. Of course, any smart navy would anticipate this and also combine all available ships into one fleet to deny the enemy easy kills. This meant that enemy navy's would hunt eachother down as singular fleet, hoping to deal enough damage to the enemy to cripple his ability to fight on the seas (or, in practice, threaten eachother with pitched battles, since ships were expensive and losing a bunch in an uncertain battle ws rarely a good idea). The Japanesse navy was in love with this doctrine, and coupled it with their whole "everyone but us is a dishonorable coward"doctrine, coming up with the idea that if only they could deal enough damage to the enemy fleet, they would surely lose heart and surrender. Of course, we all know how that went.